Reiterations
by Cantare
Summary: This is the story that once should have been. The man who narrates it has known his purpose from the beginning, painfully aware that few people in history have had as strong of a reason to live as he. So strong in fact, that it far outstrips his desire to live.
1. This is a story

A/N: This is a companion piece to Iterations, something I had in mind when I first started that fic. Seems I'm always several years late.

* * *

This is the story that once should have been.

A story has a beginning, a point at which a plot is born, sometimes quite messily and sometimes in a rather sterile fashion, and starts on the often tortuous, seldom straightforward path of a maturing process. A story also has an end. This word bears two meanings of unequal significance: the conclusion of the plot, and a purpose. The former is quite simple; the plot concludes when the words on the page are no more. The latter, on the other hand, is the essence of a story. Purpose is the lifeblood that pulses through every word, no matter how short or trivial. A story has a reason to be told. Without an end in this sense, it is a lifeless pile of words.

This is a story defined by its end, namely an end of the second order. The man who narrates it has known his purpose from the beginning, painfully aware that few people in history have had as strong of a reason to live as he. So strong in fact, that it far outstrips his desire to live.

This story is about a man who saw the end too soon and cannot escape it, despite the many paths open to him. Tantalus, ever in the act of reaching.

On the next page is this story's end.


	2. Day One

Day one of this journal.

Took five weeks of counseling for me to finally pick up the voice recorder. Always had excuses. Too busy. Too busy. Too busy. I guess it's really one excuse, in a thousand variations.

Here goes.

...and I can't do this. My mind isn't calming down. Can't remember the last time it was calm. Trunks, get it together. Focus on one goddamn thing for once.

Dr. Hayden says I don't have to talk coherently. Just talk it out. Talk my thoughts out of a spiral when she's not there to do it for me, and I can share these entries with her or I don't have to.

I'm rambling like a child.

Alright. Let me try again.

I'll talk about one of my escapes. The place my mind goes when I'm too exhausted to move and still I can't sleep, when the Rourke project falls behind once again or the reporters want another piece of me. Or they announce they're putting up a new statue of me in some town in the middle of Bumblefuck. Or those honorary degrees all these universities keep tossing at me.

I'm rambling on the negatives. Reel it in, come back to what's not negative. It's hard to think of what's not negative. What's positive?

What's positive is: the cyborgs are dead. They've been dead ten years. The world is no longer dying a slow death by killer robots. I still dream of them, but at least now when I wake up, I know they're dead.

What's positive is: the world is rebuilding. Recovering from half its population getting wiped out. What they don't like to say anymore is that a quarter of the population died from our own stupid attempts to fight the cyborgs. Entire countries erased from the map, still uninhabitable from nuclear radiation.

That's negative. Reel it in, Trunks.

What's positive is: I'm moving on, I think. I still think about Mom. All the time, in fact. But I know she's in a better place and I'll join her eventually. Sometimes I hate her for leaving me here. And then I hate myself for thinking about her so selfishly. If only she were still here, she'd have it all under control. She _did_ have it all under control before she got sick. She kept both Capsule Corp and the world from falling apart by the sheer force of her personality and her genius mind, always thinking ten steps ahead of everyone. The world would have gone to shit without her, if she hadn't built that time machine. And even after the cyborgs were gone, it still would have gone to shit if she hadn't held it together.

What the hell am I in comparison to her? I'm weak and stupid. Can't even hold myself together.

Reel it in.

What's positive is: I'm talking. At least according to Dr. Hayden, that's good. I'm talking, and that's the first step toward recovery. Recovery from what? Certainly nothing anyone sees about me in the news. The world loves me. That's also positive. I'm their hero. I miraculously killed the cyborgs and ended two decades of global genocide and anarchy. I'm the leader of the reconstruction effort. I'm the most powerful being on this planet. No one can hold a candle to me.

Everyone who could is dead. Or in the other timeline.

What's positive is: I'm going to judge myself less by talking about these things. One of the first things Dr. Hayden pointed out was that I condemn myself for literally everything I do, for every thought that passes through my mind. She says I need to forgive myself, and that one day I'll realize I've done nothing wrong that needs forgiving. That this self-hatred is just a result of pressure and fear that there's no end to this race. Self-hatred stems from feeling hopeless. You feel responsible for your own hopelessness. And you think things like, if only someone else were in my shoes, they'd do a hell of a lot better. They'd be stronger, smarter, happier. They wouldn't give up.

What's positive is: I'm stopping now. End of day one.


	3. Escape

Trying this journal thing again.

I realize I never talked about what my actual escape was, yesterday.

It would be so easy. I could do it and never look back. No one would fault me but my own conscience. Or rather, I wouldn't be able to hear the billions of voices faulting me. They'd be effectively erased from my reality.

Not that Bulma wouldn't be able to send me back eventually, anyway. Give or take a few years.

This is my escape: taking a one-way trip back to the other timeline and destroying the time machine.

I dream about it sometimes. When the depression's at its worst, the dreams are so vivid I wake up thinking I'm actually in the other timeline, in the huge room Bulma gave me in the family quarters near Gramps, Grandma and mini-me. But it's always too quiet, and that's what brings me back to reality. There isn't anyone in this house but me. Hasn't been since I nearly killed Kestrel after that one nightmare.

The other timeline isn't perfect, I know. It's unhealthy to idealize it as some sort of paradise where no one dies and the world has no problems. The world still has a shit ton of problems and its fair share of galactic villains visiting every now and then. Not to mention regular Earth problems like terrorism, war and global warming.

The other timeline isn't perfect, but no one knows me there. There's no role I have to fill. I'm not a hero, not a figurehead, not the man everyone wants to be President. That kind of freedom is something I don't dare to imagine. I don't even know how I'd feel if someone handed it to me, a magic wand that could wipe my face from collective memory. So I try not to think about it. Which naturally leads me to think about it all the time.

I haven't visited in five years. I don't trust myself to.

The time machine has been sitting there gathering dust, beneath layers of the tightest security systems Mom could cook up. I know all the passwords by heart. The scanners know my brain, my ki signature, my fingerprints, my voice and my retinas. The embedded tracker monitors my vitals and my location at all times. I'm the only one who can go down there and make use of the most revolutionary technology this half-dead world will never know about. It's rigged to self-destruct if I die.

I'm dying by slow degrees anyway. Knowing it's there makes me hate myself all the more for my cowardice, having this secret escape path that I could use if I hit really dire straits. No one else gets to make an exit like that and start over. There are no Dragonballs in this timeline, after all. Just the time machine.

I've thought about how the escape would play out. I'd land in a secluded place and shield myself for a while, get my sanity together, away from them all. Get accustomed to the idea that I'd actually left it all behind, and before the guilt would settle too deeply, I'd destroy the machine. Then I'd find Gohan. He's the person who still understands me the best, no matter how old he is. He'd understand the pressure, the burdens we take on because we're expected to, the burdens we don't dare set down because the world would break if we did. He'd understand that I'd broken first.

Bulma would smother me as usual. And I'd tell her enough of what happened, but not everything. Mom was always so strong, taking the world on her shoulders like it belonged there. Bulma's basically her, untested, but with that same core strength. She wouldn't get what I feel in its entirety. But she would welcome me and we'd be family. Sort of.

I'd avoid Vegeta for a while.

And I guess I'd meet mini-me and get to know him. He's around ten now, no longer an overactive little kindergartener. I wonder what he's like these days. Knowing Bulma, he's probably a spoiled, genius brat who's skipped a few grades already. No hardship to temper him in their timeline. Add Vegeta's influence, and he's probably more than a bit destructive.

And that's as far as I allow myself to imagine. I'm mired so deep in work that I don't know what I'd really do given an extended period of rest. Or in this scenario, an indefinite period of rest.

I know I'm not going to escape. I don't have it in me. Even with this, I'd need someone else to push me out of inertia and force my hand.

Trouble is, there isn't anyone who could pressure me. Mom was the only other person who knew about the time machine, though people have wondered and theorized for years how I grew strong enough to kill the cyborgs. No one ever came up with "traveling to an alternate timeline and training for a year with my alien father in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber" as a valid theory.

I'd have to make the decision myself to go. And I wouldn't trust myself not to set everything behind me on fire.

I'm not free, no matter what my therapist says. And with just the second entry of this audiojournal, I've managed to shut myself in again, even from her. I can't risk anyone hearing this. I'll put only slightly less security on this journal than the time machine has. Voice activation as the first layer, obviously.


	4. Goodwill

"I don't think you're in a place to understand my people's needs, Mr. Briefs," Cleary says in the most authoritative tone he can muster. His unblinking glare is at least somewhat convincing, if not his reedy voice.

"With all due respect, Mr. President—" I stop myself and roll my eyes. "Swore I wouldn't use that line. Broke a rule, didn't I?"

"I don't think you're in a place to understand my people's needs, Mr. Briefs," Cleary prompts in that same rehearsed tone, still staring me down through his hipster glasses. Never misses a beat, this guy.

"I understand enough, Mr. President, about the needs of many people beyond your citizens. The resettlement issue isn't going to be resolved by forcing even more people out of their homes."

"If you're implying that—"

"I'm not implying. I'm stating outright that you're not going to start another war out of your own greed." If this were a movie, I'd imagine the stare off intensifying. The camera focusing on my disfigured knuckles. The faint burn marks on my throat. Battle scars that the Dragonballs didn't bother healing all those years back.

"How dare you threaten me," Cleary puffs himself up, a skinny, pasty imitation of the blustering machete-waving dictator, and I can't hold it in anymore.

Laughter's almost a foreign sensation to me these days, like an infant surprising himself with the noises his own mouth makes. Soon I'm laughing so hard I can't breathe. I know it's not that funny, but with my mental state I seem to take all emotions to extremes.

Cleary tries to look dignified as he patiently waits out my outburst.

"Trunks. Any day now," he says when I don't show any signs of stopping. A few seconds later, he starts to sound concerned. "We only have a few hours left before you meet President Kambar. You have to have this down."

"I know." It comes out as a wheeze. I wipe a tear from my eye and finally get it together. I say it again more seriously, as if I'm in the room with that blowhard and really do have to threaten him with personal harm. "I know."

"You okay?" Cleary says uncertainly. "Did you fly yourself here last night? I was worried when you missed the official transport."

"Yeah." It's a half-lie. I can always count on this kid to feed me a cover story, even against his own questioning. "I hate closed spaces, you know that. Wanted some time to clear my head too."

"Well, I suggest you spend the rest of the morning clearing the rest of it. I know you're under a lot of stress, but we're counting on you."

This isn't the first time he's chastised me. He used to be shy about contradicting me in any way, just like most people are when they first meet me and only see the exalted savior of the world. Then they get to know me, or the persona I let them think is me, and either treat me like a high maintenance pop star or an inexperienced politician with an impulsive streak.

I learned how to separate the pawns from the system a long time ago. It's the government Cleary and his staff represent that I can't stand. He's just doing his job. So I just smile and joke around with him a bit more before he leaves me alone to rehearse on my own. And then I drop the façade and kick back with a whiskey out of the hotel room fridge.

Cleary's the most bearable of the government lot I've had to work with the last couple years. He's one of those whiz kids who graduated from college in three years, got his PhD in political science while writing speeches for President Matsuzawa, has ambitions to be Chief of Staff one day. Patient, smart, idealistic to a fault. Able to bear with my flaws behind the scenes as he makes me shine in public. Polishes that image of me as the silver bullet that keeps this country at the forefront of reconstruction, and the rest of the world in begrudging admiration.

He's starting to see underneath my flaws, I'm afraid. Only Dr. Hayden ever sees the broken parts of me nowadays, but Cleary's sharp. He suspects there's something wrong beneath the flippant cynicism and the chronic lateness. But he'll let it be, just like everyone else, as long as I perform in my role. Enforcer of peace, deliverer of inspiring speeches, defender of justice, "Goodwill Ambassador." All on my free time when I'm not up to my neck running Capsule Corporation.

I saw this coming years ago, and I didn't do anything to avoid it. I was as idealistic as Cleary back then, with the cyborgs' shattered circuits freshly strewn around my feet, eager to keep saving the world in any way it needed. I thought I could handle it, that it was what I was born to do, that it was the least I could do for a world that had been careening toward extinction. I thought it'd be worth it. Lay my life down just like all my heroes had – thirty years ago when the cyborgs first showed up, and in the other timeline when I lined up with the rest of them in a united front against Cell.

Should have known better, though. I'd spent enough time with the two full-blooded Saiyans in the other timeline to know that it wasn't a united front at all. It was each man thirsting for glory, consciously or unconsciously using the Cell Games as a cover for his own bloodlust. Vegeta at least was never subtle about it. Goku, on the other hand, only revealed his hand when he tossed Cell that fateful senzu bean and shoved his son into the ring.

I know I was the last person Goku cared about at that moment, but I had never felt so betrayed. Not even when Vegeta had let Cell ascend the first time. Or anything else my pseudo-father had done in his impressive capacity for cruelty and self-absorption. As I said, Vegeta was never subtle about anything, including his disdain for me and everything else in existence other than his drive to win. But Goku was supposed to be the hero, the one who cared for the greater good of the world, the one my mom nearly lost her eyesight for, peering into microscopes and nearly taking her eyes out in lab accidents late into the night, all so she could find him a cure. The word we etched onto the time machine was a synonym for his name. As long as he stayed alive, there was hope.

He almost threw that hope away because he wanted his son to know what it was like to be a full-blooded Saiyan. No, not just that. He wanted Gohan to embrace his Saiyan identity and enjoy it, not to bury that skeleton and unearth it only when necessary. He wanted him to crave battle for the sake of battle, practical odds and the Earth's fate be damned. In the end, he was no different from Vegeta, who pounded my face in for the better part of a year in the time chamber, telling me I was a pathetic excuse for a Saiyan, that he couldn't believe I had a drop of his blood in my veins. Different test, same sadistic purpose behind it.

The worst part is, beneath the betrayal, I understood. No matter what Vegeta said, I was and still am part Saiyan. I know what it's like to thirst for a challenge, to feel in my bones that it only counts as a real challenge if I spill blood and nearly die.

Giving my life in service to a broken world would have been the ultimate challenge, I thought back then. Billions of people loved me for it. Most still do, though some have gotten tired of me by now.

Saiyans aren't meant to give their lives in service to anyone, though. They fight and kill and die on their own terms, to satisfy their own bloodthirstiness and instinctual need to grow stronger. My fight these past ten years has been bizarrely counter to Saiyan nature as an altruistic crusade for the greater good. Though I've won plenty of political and humanitarian victories, none of it has been for me. In this sense, I can say I've been a much better savior than Goku. What did he ever really sacrifice? Beneath all the lives he saved, every battle was a chance for him to slake his bloodlust, ride that incomparable high of getting beaten within an inch of his life and then come back victorious from it. It was what he wanted, and what I've subconsciously wanted with the insane half of my soul.

I didn't need Dr. Hayden to puzzle all this out for me. I've had enough introspection time since Kestrel moved out, between staring at my hands over how close I'd come to killing someone, and how my blood quickened every time I thought about it. Being Saiyan is a sickness.

As the whiskey fades out of my system faster than I'd like and Cleary comes back to tell me the jolly old dictator's almost here, I wrap that sickness around me like armor. If I can't fight with fists, I'll tear into him with the tools I've been given. Every pompous political figure they set me against thinks I care about what I'm defending more than I actually do. If only they knew how much I've stopped.


	5. History

My half-lie to Cleary is this: I did fly myself here yesterday. I just passed over a lot of other places before reaching the Republic of Kambar.

Honestly, naming a country after yourself? Not even the cyborgs did that. I don't know if I'll be able to stay professional for as long as I need to when Mr. Machete and his paunch walk through the door.

In the absence of any real battles, it's my routine to fly myself to exhaustion. I go as fast as I can, burning more power than I need, and dare myself to make it to whatever my destination is without tiring out and crash-landing. Or drowning in the ocean, which is the more likely scenario. It's one of those things where I hope I fail as much as I instinctively fight to survive.

I fly just below the clouds most of the time, so I can map out what I'm passing over. The remains of the Himalayas, their once proud peaks decimated to rubble. The plains of Tibet and the sprawling desert and canyons of west Asia, left relatively untouched because the cyborgs never bothered to visit. The nuclear wasteland of Russia. The nuclear wasteland of half of Western Europe. Ditto for most of Africa. The beginnings of reconstruction above ground in the Middle East. The last of the force fields being dismantled around the biggest oil fields. The English Channel, plugged and unplugged and plugged again whenever the politicians there decide refugees are a nuisance. And then the vast ocean that's almost claimed me on several of these trips, before I hit the United States. Starting at the Great Lakes, it turns into the United Republic and the remains of its failed cousin of rebellion, the 10th Corridor.

The map winds on. History is a popular field of study these days in universities around the world, alongside all the practical majors that help with rebuilding infrastructure. There's so much that was lost, broken apart and smashed back together in jagged pieces, narratives that were all but drowned out in the mass hysteria that followed the cyborgs' initial rampages across east Asia, the nuclear wars that followed, the civil wars that followed those, the puppet government 17 set up for his own amusement out of Washington, D.C., the continental sundering of North and South America by 18.

I read a lot of history books growing up. Mom was always adamant about that. She wanted me to know the truth, not what the politicians were saying or whatever the cyborgs wanted the stations to broadcast. She wanted me to remember the things we were fighting to save, even if most of them were slipping from our grasp while I read about them. And, once she started building the time machine, she wanted me to know the world I was going back to and not have shell shock over how different it was. It would already be enough of a shock to see all her old friends and family alive, and to be an alien among them.

Kambar is setting up a fiefdom in Southeast Asia, where the devastation during the cyborg years was mostly from disease. He rose to power by whipping the people into a frenzy over the conspiracy theory that the monarchy had set loose a genetically engineered virus on its own citizens, in the hopes that it would take out the cyborgs during their months-long "vacation" there.

History is still being rewritten every day. Most people will buy into whatever gets them food, clothing, undamaged land and revenge against somebody they'd like to blame.

Bulma and Gohan asked me about what my world was like, during my second visit while we prepared for the Cell Games. They were the only ones who did. The others seemed to pity me too much to ask, or they just didn't care. The same cyborgs that had destroyed my world were threatening to destroy theirs, and more of the bastards were crawling out of the woodworks, models that I never knew Gero had planned. I don't blame them for not thinking too hard about where I came from, and what I'd be going back to.

Last night I started wearing out around the northern part of Australia. When my vision started to black out I lowered my altitude. When I couldn't feel my hands I pushed myself harder even as I dropped out of Super Saiyan. The scope of my thoughts narrowed down to the emergency routine: _Stay alive. Or don't._ _Drop into the ocean now, and no one will ever find you. You're a fucking coward._

I made it, of course, like I always do. I threw down a capsule house on the beach, stumbled inside and passed out on the floor. Woke up mid-morning, freshened up and strolled into the hotel looking only slightly worse for the wear. Cleary and his team promptly shoved me into a suite and made me memorize the notes they'd drafted.

I feel a mellow kind of tiredness on the days after I almost die. A strange mix of disappointment and relief.

Cleary's texting me now, some last-minute pleas to stay on script that I'll take as suggestions. The conference room is swept for bugs one more time by security. I'm sitting here sipping coffee and studying the portraits on the walls of ordinary citizens before and after the cyborg years. A sobering touch to remind me of why I'm here and why I agree to the government's requests each time a little "enforcement" is needed.

The doors open and a dozen children file in, dressed in the dictator's colors and cheerily singing a welcome song. They part into two rows and clap as the man himself strolls in and offers me a broad smile from across the room. A good number of soldiers flank him, ignoring the children entirely.

"Welcome to the Republic of Kambar," he says in his drawling accent, hands spread wide. "I trust your journey was smooth?"

I smile with steel. The children are another reminder. "Just a hop skip over the ocean. It's nice to meet you, Mr. President. I can't wait to get started."


	6. Future

It's 2 AM on a weekend and I can't sleep. Supposed to be time to rest, but I can't stop thinking. No one's here to hear me. Still feels weird, recording myself. Makes me self-conscious and hyper-aware of any mistakes I make. I half-expect Cleary to pop out and stop me whenever I stutter, and tell me to start again.

Anyway, I'm awake because I'm overthinking, as usual. I feel like it's a necessity to be paranoid given everything I'm responsible for, and I don't know if I could turn it off even if I tried.

There are a lot of people out there with much less than I have, who came out of the cyborg years with their homes destroyed, their families dead, their livelihoods shattered, and still found contentment and healing. I've met hundreds of them over the past ten years. I've read some of their biographies. I think a common theme among them is that they don't overthink. Or when they do think about the worst times or have to confront hard questions, they do it with optimism. They see that the worst is behind them. They feel they have an active hand in how their future is going to turn out, yet they don't blame themselves if things go wrong. And they simply do their best to live good lives. They don't have very high expectations of how life should be.

I've tried to be more like that. I suspect Dr. Hayden is trying to push me in that direction too. I need to see myself as an active driver of my own destiny. God, I hate that word. "Destiny." So full of bullshit.

I'd use the word "future" instead, but that also has a ton of baggage. In the other timeline, sometimes Yamucha or Tenshinhan or even Bulma would get confused about which Trunks someone was referring to. To clarify, they'd call me either "Older Trunks" or "Future Trunks."

"Future Trunks." Yeah.

I never realized how significant names were until they started calling me that. Like, "Hey, this is Future Trunks. You know, from the future. _That_ future. Not the one for this timeline. Technically he doesn't exist here. He's just temporary."

I know they didn't mean it like that. It was just my overthinking again. But it made me conscious of what Mom knew all along, that I'd feel like an alien there and wouldn't ever fully belong, no matter how much I wanted to. And now in my own timeline, when I think of that moniker, I think of incompletion. Like there's some future version of me always out of my reach, who has all the answers and feels like a full human being. Saiyan-human hybrid. Whatever.

I'm tired of philosophizing like this and yet I can't stop. This is who I am, and it's gotten worse in the last year. This is utterly useless and I know it.

Trying to reel it in. Not supposed to dwell on negatives or condemn myself for things that aren't even wrong. What's wrong with thinking? Or talking into a recorder when I could be sleeping? I don't have a fucking curfew. I'm not under Vegeta's training regimen. I don't have to answer to anyone.

The only person I answer to is myself, and I hate myself. Or at least the person I've become. Sometimes I feel like I'm not even me, that this person I hate is this other entity I can fight and kill the way I would a real enemy. I dream about it sometimes. It always starts off as a cyborg dream. Usually 18, maybe because she was always pretending. I'll be fighting her and losing, and then she'll turn into me. And I'll fight him to a standstill, until I'm missing an arm like Gohan, and I'm face down in the mud barely able to move. He'll be down too, sometimes unconscious, sometimes staring at me and saying something I can't hear. Once he was laughing.

Probably laughing at the fact I can't finish the job. I come dangerously close to burning out over the ocean, but I still force myself to make it to land. Some nights I go over the time machine's security codes in my head, but I never make a move toward that room. In the morning I look at myself in the mirror and think: I should smash this fucker's face in. And I don't.

This is really not healthy. I know. One of the first questions Dr. Hayden asked me was whether I had any thoughts about harming myself. I think I told her I had a list. She wanted to go through it with me. We've gone through maybe three scenarios so far, the tamest ones, and she manages to talk me out of each one. She has enough experience with suicidal nutcases to know that I'm not in immediate danger. But even if I were, what could she do? What could anyone on this planet do to stop me from doing anything I felt like?

Technically, nothing. If I wanted, I could finish the job the cyborgs started. They weren't really serious about destroying humanity. They were bored, sadistic teenagers using the Earth as their playground. I could shoot straight through the Earth's core the way Frieza did to Namek, and take the planet out along with myself. But of course I wouldn't do that.

Doing violence to myself, on the other hand, is completely possible. There aren't any restraints that could hold me. No drugs that could keep me down. It's hard enough to keep a human from committing suicide when they've made up their mind, never mind a Saiyan.

But this is all just bluster. Our bodies trick our minds into thinking that death is the end of existence. So we treat it with terror and resist it at the molecular level. Every cell in my body strains so hard to survive whenever I take those cross-continental flights, my lungs struggling to take in another breath of air, my brain rechanneling my ki to the muscles that can most effectively make the last push to shore.

My mind knows better what would actually happen if I crash and burn one of these days. When Cell killed me, I found myself on an endless field of fluffy clouds, waiting on the longest line I had ever seen. I didn't make it to King Yemma's desk before I was wished back. Some of his underlings pulled me out of the line and started arguing about which afterlife I was supposed to be in, since I wasn't part of their timeline. I think they genuinely didn't know what to do, and my resurrection saved them from a bureaucratic nightmare.

When I die in this timeline, I'll get to the desk. I'll get a stamp of approval for heaven. And I'll essentially keep living, but in a different plane.

As I said before, I can't imagine what it'd be like to live free of this depression. I'm drawing a blank. All I see is this miserable existence continuing.

I know this is a symptom. This shortsightedness about life, this feeling of hopelessness that my reality is always going to be like this. I know I had a life before this set in. And I can eventually get past it and be normal again. But it's all abstract right now.

Hope is supposed to be an expectation that things will be better in the future. The catch is that hope itself exists in the present. The thing we hope _for_ is in the future.

My problem is that I can't feel any hope in the present. What do you do when hope itself is a far-off thing?


	7. Monday

As dysfunctional as my weekends are, this is my Monday morning.

I drag myself out of bed at 6.

Showered and dressed by 6:30.

Driver has a double shot of espresso and breakfast waiting for me in the car at 6:40.

Going into the city, I read the news and the memos Arlen's written up for me.

Make it into the office by 7:30.

Make small talk with Arlen, Kai or whoever crosses my path on the way in the door, shoot off one-line responses to emails that need my immediate attention.

8:00. I'm in the Pepper Town conference room for an R&D strategy meeting. We named all our conference rooms after cities that the cyborgs destroyed. Not the major ones, like Moscow, Chicago or Kuala Lumpur, but the small places that were never marked on a globe.

I chose the name for this room. It's got a view of the bay. Gohan used to train me on the cliffs. Sometimes we'd go for a swim after we were done.

I catch up with my executive team for a few minutes. They're a capable bunch. Some started here under my grandfather's leadership. The Chief Science Officer, Marcel Hersh, worked with him on the second generation of capsule technology and led the team that quadrupled storage capacity on standard capsules. He's almost seventy now, and still trains for marathons.

Frieda Cohen, the Chief Medical Officer, joined two years ago after Soren Kjellberg retired. It's a role we established during my mom's personal crusade to engineer a cure for Goku's heart virus. Soren was her mentor during that whole endeavor, and he and his students took on the brunt of the work near the end, freeing her up so she could work on the time machine. Not that they knew that. To this day, he still believes that the antidote was for me, to guard against some hereditary disease my father might have passed on to me. In any case, healthcare has continued to be a huge area of growth for us, and Frieda has brought new ideas to the table.

There's Penelope Bristol, the COO. She was Mom's right hand, kept everything running while Mom spent months at a time focusing on "special projects." A lot of the younger executives including me look up to her as a sort of parent figure. She has a keen mind for strategy and a fierce protectiveness over our people. In the wave of government takeovers that took place globally once the devastation started, she was one of the key voices who convinced my mom not to sell any part of Capsule Corp to a state-owned enterprise. If there were anyone I'd trust with the reins, it'd be her. Unfortunately, she's made it clear that she's not interested in being CEO.

Hiro Takata is our EVP of Public Policy. The government wasn't very happy with Mom's decision. Bringing Hiro on board was a conciliatory move, so she would "take the public interest into consideration" at the executive level. Hiro is a pain in the ass. When he first started out he was primarily there to pressure Capsule Corp into doing what the government wanted. A lot of weapons development that was completely pointless, because nothing ever worked against the cyborgs. Over the years we've hammered out a more collegial relationship, and have won a fair number of big contracts through him. Basically he's made himself a very valuable pain in the ass.

The main thing we're discussing today is what to do since several countries just canceled their contracts with us. Some of them were very lucrative contracts. All of them were with non-democratic regimes that haven't been too excited about my involvement in politics. I might have gone a little overboard with the Kambar negotiation, and at the press conference afterward.

It's an unusual situation. As far as public figures go, I'm a pretty unique case. I guess you could call me a real life Bruce Wayne. I lead the most powerful corporation in the world and I fight global villainy on the side. Except my Batman persona is no secret. The grainy cellphone footage of me taking out the cyborgs is still the most played video on the Internet, and there have been four bestselling biographies written about me. I'm due for a fifth this year, and I'm dreading it. The writer wants to make it a book of leadership advice or some crap like that.

It's been a delicate balance so far, always in danger of tipping too far to one side. At some point when the world's stable, I have to give up one role or the other, or both. That was the plan when I started, anyway. Now it looks like it'll take at least two more decades. Every night I feel like I can't last two more days.

No one in this room knows that.

I get straight to the point about the problem before us. We did a ton of very specialized tech development for these contracts, and now we've been left hanging. We have little bargaining power to make the governments pay what they owe us on time, or at all, for backing out early.

We have several options. Try to get the clients back. That's Hiro's territory. I personally can't do anything without contradicting President Matsuzawa's mandate for me. Or, we could look for other clients, public or private, who might be interested in these very specific applications of capsule tech. Doubtful, since a lot of it is in nuclear energy and almost everyone's steering clear of that. The work we did for one contract on antimalarial medicine might be transferable, but it's minor compared to everything else. Or, we could just eat the loss and redirect the divisions involved to other projects. We'd have to figure out what to redirect them to. Most likely there'll be layoffs. I really don't want that to happen.

The meeting is as efficient as it can be, given Hiro's presence. I decide in the end that I'll give him two weeks to win back what he can, and I'll stay out of any diplomatic engagements while he's at it. Frieda will tap into her network about the antimalarial solution. Marcel and Penelope will figure out a backup plan for where to place our people in case Hiro can't save our asses.

The rest of the morning I answer emails, start preparing remarks for a conference next week, meet with the executive team of a nanotechnology company we just bought, and call President Matsuzawa to complain that my work as a government-leashed Batman is costing Bruce Wayne business. His aide dutifully writes down my message and promises that the President will call back within the day.

This is a fairly average Monday. I'm doing fine, treading water. I'm not hyperventilating. I don't feel like my brain's leaking out my ears. Just have to power through the rest of the day and then it can leak as much as it wants when I get home.

It's lunchtime.

I'm about to head to the dining floor when Arlen stops me at the elevator, looking a bit concerned.

"Trunks, Dr. Kjellberg's expecting you. Seaside Market, one o'clock. I sent you a note on the change this morning."

I forgot Soren was visiting. We'd scheduled this a long time ago.

This absolutely makes my day. I smile more genuinely than usual, and Arlen stops looking worried and smiles tentatively back.

"That's right. Slipped my mind. I'll get there. Thanks." I'm already moving away from the elevator and back to my office, to the window.

"Watch out for the window cleaner!" Arlen calls after me as I break into a jog.

It's an old joke between us, the fact that I almost kicked a window cleaner in the face the first time I dropped down from my 35th floor office without looking. I acknowledge the warning with a wave and he laughs.

I make the drop without incident. The restaurant's a few blocks away and it takes less than a minute to cover the distance.

Soren is waiting for me when I arrive. Still wearing his fisherman's hat, a worn sweater vest and old jeans. He's leaning on a cane, which is new. His handshake is as firm as ever.

"Hello, Trunks," he says in his gravelly voice, and I laugh at the way my name sounds in his accent, lingering on the "s." It's been way too long since I caught up with this man. For the first time in a long time, I'm feeling happy.


	8. Antidote

Soren met with me today to tell me two things.

In the middle of lunch he pulled out a data key and a case of medicine. He said he did more research on my father's heart condition and improved the antidote, and reminded me to start taking it this year. Of course. I'm 30. Goku's age when he died.

There are moments when you're able to forget about the shit that's happening in your life, and you somehow escape the muck of self-absorbed misery that was blocking all exits before. It's when you drag your face up and see something bigger outside of yourself, and know there are still good things out there that can surprise you. Good people who surprise you by how much they love you, and you realize all the more how much you don't deserve it. I felt like I was stepping out of a mineshaft I'd been buried in for a year, and taking a breath of fresh air.

Soren had no reason to keep researching that antidote. He'd already done more than enough to help us outside his official responsibilities as an executive of Capsule Corp. He did this completely selflessly, not knowing that the antidote was never meant for me in the first place. I would've stopped him from wasting his time if I'd known what he was planning. But he wouldn't have told me. He meant it as a gift.

"I want you to live a long, healthy life, Trunks," he told me when I was still speechless and staring at the small box next to my plate. "Not just because the world needs you, but because you deserve it."

He's always had that serene way of stating things like they're obvious, that steadfast peacefulness around him that helped keep everyone together during bad times. I don't know how he did it all those years, especially when the cyborgs came dangerously close to destroying our research base. I know for a fact that without him my mom would not have finished the antidote, and we wouldn't have been able to save Goku. Not just because Soren's a genius, but because he had this amazing ability to stay calm and lead people onward despite any combination of setbacks. He was the only Capsule Corp exec who didn't take the relocation offer that would have housed his family in the safest compound in the country. His wife was a social worker, and they wanted to stay close to the people she cared for in the emergency camps.

If more people were like Soren Kjellberg, the world would rebuild itself faster. And maybe I wouldn't mind giving my life for it.

The second thing he came to tell me was that he's entered the early stages of Alzheimer's.

Whiplash. He'd just pulled me out of my pit of self-pity and cynicism, and the next moment I was back in the dark. A different kind of dark.

I asked him how long he had. He didn't know. A decade would be a stretch. Five, six years, maybe.

I couldn't say anything else for a while. What could I say first? That I couldn't believe it? Because I really couldn't. The man's one of the sharpest people I know, up there with my mother. His mind was one of humanity's critical weapons against the cyborgs, though he still doesn't know just how big of an impact he had, helping us with that antidote. It didn't make sense to me that that genius mind could deteriorate to nothing. That it's already begun that process of decay.

It isn't fair. The reality of life's fundamental unfairness isn't new to me at all, but getting hit with this is more personal than the mass devastation the cyborgs caused and all the shit that humans have been inflicting on each other since. Soren Kjellberg is one of the best human beings I know, and he's the last person who deserves a fate like this.

And because he's one of the best human beings alive, he actually tried to reassure me. He told me that everyone has to die someday, and he's lucky to know ahead of time so he can spend the remaining time with the people he loves. It's more than what most people get.

I know he must still be processing, that he can't have made total peace with this horrible disease that'll destroy bit by bit what is most precious to him, his brilliant mind and his very identity. But he's made enough peace with it to be able to offer consolation to me, someone who's not even related to him, who hasn't seen him in years. Hell, he's spent the past few months working on a fucking antidote he believes will save _my_ life while knowing his own clock is ticking. I don't deserve to know this man.

I almost told him the truth. About everything. It's been festering inside since the only other person who shared these secrets died. I wanted to tell him about the time machine and the real reason Mom enlisted him to make that antidote. That there's another timeline where everything's whole, and that I trained there with the strongest fighters in the universe to save both their world and ours. That I feel so overwhelmingly alone keeping all this in, and he of all people should know the truth behind the monstrous strength in me that killed the cyborgs. That he was part of what made that monstrous strength possible, and he doesn't need to give me anything more.

But telling him would have been selfish. It would have only taken a burden off of me and shifted it to him, and he doesn't need that now.

And of course, there's what Mom and I discussed long ago. The pact we made. It's obvious that it's not the right time yet. The world's still too unstable, and I don't want to imagine what would happen if the information fell into the wrong hands.

We stayed in that restaurant much longer than the one hour Arlen slotted into my calendar. I missed another strategy meeting and several calls from Cleary and the President. I felt like crushing my phone in my hand instead of merely turning it off. Everything around me seemed colorless and insignificant except for the man sitting across the table, serenely telling me that it was okay to grieve or feel angry, but not to go overboard with it because he wasn't grieving or angry.

I asked him where his strength comes from. He told me about his faith.

I listened quietly, not contradicting him. I know that heaven isn't what he thinks. I know that God doesn't act like that, that there isn't a single God but many of them, and they're even more incompetent than your average government bureaucrat. They certainly don't care about humans the way Soren believes.

More truths that I won't tell him. He'll find out eventually, and I think he'll be able to deal with it just like he's dealt with everything life has thrown at him so far.

"Bodily sickness, even degenerative brain disease, is nothing compared to sickness of the soul," he told me. "There is only one true cure for the latter, and I hope you find it."

I told him I know. Sickness of the soul is exactly what I've been trapped in, and of course I want to get out. I wish I could believe what Soren believes. If I hadn't seen the truth firsthand, maybe I would.

The best I could say was that I'm searching. I think he could see through me, and he knows it wasn't just the news of his disease that had me looking so defeated.

Eventually we ended our lunch and parted ways. He hugged me and told me again to take the antidote on time. Again that I deserve a long and healthy life, and he hopes I never lose sight of how meaningful my life is.

The rest of the day meant nothing. It was treading sludge instead of water. I flew home instead of taking the car. I briefly considered flying past it toward the ocean and running the gauntlet again. But I didn't want to disrespect Soren and spit on all that he did for me.

And now I'm sitting here with the old scenarios playing out in my head. The well-worn paths I've stopped myself again and again from completing.

I'm thinking about the time machine. And the Dragonballs. Those were part of the pact, too.


End file.
